By the eighth day since they had begun defending the evacuation, the mouth of Iron Gate Gorge looked like a quarry of black bone. The wall of dead fiends stood twenty-two feet high. Frozen ichor had hardened between the plates, holding claws and pieces of skull in place. New waves had spent days walking on the bodies beneath them.
Pei Jing sat on the crest with the Astral Bone Blade across his legs. His tunic had dried stiff with salt, dust and void sludge. It cracked a little when he moved his shoulders. The blade weighed three hundred and sixty pounds at rest. Its edge was still clean where he had worked it with the Black Mountain Whetstone the night before.
He pulled a turnip from the embers between his boots. He split the charred skin, dipped a piece in gray salt and ate it. It was hot enough to steam in the wind. For a while he could taste the earth it had grown in instead of the void fog. He took a drink from the iron pot beside him and listened to his core turn. It had been taking the poison out of the air he breathed and keeping the void iron in his bones.
